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From CAD User AEC Magazine  Vol 22 No 1 - JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009

What impact does an application like Revit have when it is introduced into a practice? David Chadwick talks to Mark Stodgell and James Savage at Pozzoni, in Altrincham, to find out

Jumping from 2D to 3D is a pretty big deal. Diving into a full-blown BIM package like Revit raises issues above and beyond the merely mechanical application of building design tools. To find out just what effect it has on an architectural practice, I asked Autodesk to set up an interview for me with one of their customers. Accordingly, I was delighted to chew over the subject with Mark Stodgell, IT Director, and James Savage, CAD Manager of the Pozzoni partnership, based in Altrincham, Cheshire.

Until 2004, Pozzoni was using a 2D version of Bentley's Microstation and Powerdraft, a very expensive version of AutoCAD LT. Besides not offering any 3D capabilities, new people coming into the company where having to be trained to use the software - a retrograde step for them and the company. They decided, therefore, to upgrade their software tools entirely - looking first at Bentley's latest releases, including Triforma - and then pitted Autodesk's Revit directly against Graphisoft's ArchiCAD. They chose Revit, and in 2006 started to roll out the software in the company.

Now, Pozzoni is completely committed to Revit with 32 seats overall, having taken roughly two years to transfer everyone across. They are currently in the throes of a second round of training, raising everyone's skill levels in the software a couple of notches.

The ability of Pozzoni staff to take new software skills on board is interesting. Initially, everyone was given training. Some took to it like a duck to water, some spent longer learning the new techniques. After the training, though, the levels of assimilation varied. Some staff extended their knowledge at their own pace, while others, who were not using the software on a regular basis, had to go through re-learning curves for each new project. First lesson learned, then. Gathering teams together for projects revealed that they did not have equal levels of knowledge in Revit. It was essential for all members of the team to have good Revit skills - hence the second round of training, initiated eight months ago. Prior to this Pozzoni had designated members of each team as CAD co-ordinators - power users of the software, who could be relied on for troubleshooting software issues. Another problem arose from the initial speed of implementation. Trials were obviously run before they began to use Revit in earnest, but an incomplete understanding of the new way of working led to problems later on in the early Revit projects.

A key decision was to give one of the team members responsibility for the Revit model. As 'model owner', he or she had full responsibility for every aspect of its development, with a formal handover of the CAD model whenever 'ownership' changed (as a result of retirement, holidays, promotion etc.). This mirrored exactly the role of the Project Site Manager, only office based. Pozonni is now looking to extend 'model ownership' to more members within a team, seeking to strengthen the breadth of knowledge and responsibility for the model - and the project - at a higher level, creating a core team of people for each project who really understood the model.

Continuity of expertise was also found to be a problem with architectural students taken on for their work experience. Having used 3D CAD extensively at University they were more at ease with it, and often found responsibility for complex tasks being pushed down to them - only for Pozzoni to find that they had to return to University before the project was finished! Mark, like managers in other practices, naturally encouraged the best of them to return after they had finished their studies.

Another initiative, designed to improve the overall knowledge levels of the practice and also to instil company standards and methods - was to produce an in-house Revit manual. This is particularly useful for covering more complex or uncommon Revit procedures, usually encountered by Pozzoni in its larger projects, such as Care Homes. It also balanced out another conundrum: combining the evident computer and CAD skills of the younger generation with the knowledge and experience of the older staff!

WORKFLOW, NOT CAD SKILLS

Mark explained how training had evolved in Pozzoni. "Now," he said, "it isn't so much about which button to press, but more about what's going on behind it. A lot of training places the emphasis on 'press this, click here', and so on, but not about the consequences of such actions."

Mark explained that understanding how and why the Revit model was being

produced also helped eradicate another, surprising, problem. "Unless the Project Manager was on the ball people got carried away using the software, and tended to overdraw, producing totally superfluous detail." He gave an example a fantastic 3D sideboard created for one project that could have been replaced by a simple 3D cube. "Not only is it a waste of time and resources, but it saddles the model file with masses of extraneous data, slowing the computer down," he added.

Another surprising waste of resources was found to be the amount of extraneous detail in standard object libraries, with far too many parameters. Mark explained that they decided to build a new library from scratch, with core components and more limited detail - conforming more precisely with what they actually needed to use.

This led to another issue that needed resolving: the take-up of computer processing power. Having taken on Revit, they found themselves having to buy faster and faster machines to handle the software. Drawings were taking 15 minutes to produce, and 2D renderings were found to be very power intensive. A line had to be drawn, so, instead of seeking yet faster processors, they started thinking about optimising the model instead.

Asked whether the use of Revit had improved relationships with clients, the answer was an emphatic yes. "Clients can and demand - to see interior and exterior views of their projects. They don't understand the plans. They need good representations that they can present to their boards," said Mark.

Visualisation was an important part of the Revit project right from the start. Pozzoni purchased a couple of seats of 3ds studio max at the same time as it installed Revit, and currently has a two-man graphics team with sole responsibility for turning Revit model data into high level visuals.

This aspect of their work is also still under development, and having used Photoshop extensively in the past to create artistic representations of their work, scanning sketches and using the software's various artistic tricks to colour wash the sketches, or to cut them into photographs, they are now looking at Autodesk's Impression to see if their artistic endeavours can be taken further.

The reaction of senior partners? Basically good, but they did point out one issue that had to be addressed; the quality of lines within drawings, and the lack of depth of field and line-weight in them - a basic requirement that enabled people to understand drawings more readily. The solution was there in Revit, but their experience in using the software hadn't quite reached that point. Revit has a high degree of flexibility with line weighting, but that technique hadn't quite been assimilated.

Both Mark and James concurred on one final point - that the adoption of Revit had been beneficial to the company, but to make the software work requires frank evaluations at each stage of the implementation, and a willingness to revise strategies as and when necessary.

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